"Chretien, twelfth-century French poet, is one of the fountainheads of Arthurian romance. . . . Cline brings Yvain to glowing, entertaining life in a delightful, sprightly, colloquial rhyming version worthy of the best translations from the French by Richard Wilbur. . . . One hopes Cline will do the whole canon of Chretien—it would be a marvelous enrichment of accessible Arthurian literature."
—Wall Street Journal

This verse translation of Yvain; or, The Knight with the Lion brings to life a fast-paced yet remarkably subtle work often considered to be the masterpiece of the twelfth-century French writer Chrétien de Troyes. The creator of the Arthurian romance as a genre, Chrétien is revealed in this work as a witty, versatile writer who mastered both the soaring flight of emotion and the devastating aside and was as skillful a debater of the finer points of love as he was a describer of battles.